Close to home Shabana Basij Rasikh

Author: Sarah Harris

Shabana Basij Rasikh's passion is relentless. From her tiny person emanates an almost tangible energy, a distinct and rumbling hunger for change. Her laughter is contagious, her eyes always bright.

I often think about my friend who spent six years dressed as a boy in order to attend school. Shabana's formative Saturdays were spent doing the family's shopping. As a young girl disguised in jeans and a t-shirt, she saw women beaten at the hands of the Taliban for walking alone, for displaying their faces. She grew accustomed to the sound of gunfire. She still jumps at the screech of trucks passing. I marvel that here we both are, eating in Ross, slipping on the ice - that our lives are currently filled with the same melodramas of our neighbors.

During exam week, I give Shabana a ride to Boston, the first in a series of stops culminating in her arrival home, to Kabul, Afghanistan. It is a strange drive. We leave at 11 p.m., immediately following her exam, hoping to catch a few hours' sleep before her 7 a.m. flight the following day. As we zoom across a darkened New England, strains of Amir Jan Sabori and Gwen Stefani (an unlikely pairing and testament) echo across our quiet conversation.

"Are you scared?" I ask. She sighs.

"My professor advised me to go and listen, to observe. I need to see how things are changing. I'm going to try and keep my head down this trip."

Something in her voice stuns me - a weariness? I remember what she said when I interviewed her a few weeks prior: "For me, to have that passion about Afghanistan, to have that belief that Afghanistan too can be a peaceful country - it just increases every day. I'm falling more and more in love with Afghanistan."

This girl, she gives and gives and gives. Sometimes, I worry about her.

Before the quiet turns too heavy she chuckles, reminding me of the speeding ticket accrued at the outset of our journey a few hours prior. I am grateful for her laughter in the face of this venture. Her infectious giggle - it is something akin to hope.

Amid the pink light of waking traffic we hug goodbye. It is odd to be almost crying with your friend in a fluttering sea of taxis, knowing that tomorrow she will be home in a place that she both loves and struggles against, a place portrayed to me only as harsh and inhospitable.

I cannot know that a week later, while cross-country skiing with my family, my friend is talking her way out of bribes at the Pakistani border, recklessly seeking visas so that her sisters might study in the United States. I cannot know that she has quietly tucked a bill into your glove compartment to pay the ticket, that even though she spends the break running from embassy to embassy she thinks to bring me back a bedspread. I cannot know that as the New Year dawns she will struggle to make sense of her journey and I will look on, unsure of what to say.

And I hope. I hope (and perhaps I know) that Shabana will do that which she does best - laugh.

Together we lift her suitcase from the trunk and she inquires as to the covering that stretches over the back hatch. "Oh, you know, to cover up whatever's in the trunk, just in case I want to transport dead bodies or something." Her eyes twinkle.

"With friends from Afghanistan, you should expect that." You give her an enormous hug as a bone sun rises and planes clatter into a bright and chilly sky.

Editor's note: Sarah Harris '11 was recently named a Middlebury Narrative Journalism Fellow, participating in the project "How'd you get here?" Over the course of 2008-2009 Harris and fellows Mallory Falk '09, Lois Parshley '11, and Aylie Baker '09 will be interviewing students about their personal journeys - be it literal or figurative - to Middlebury College. The stories they collect will be produced as audio narratives for radio and Web broadcast. A collection of stories will appear in public exhibition in May, but excerpts from selected interviews will also be published bi-weekly as part of the new "Close to Home" series in the Campus. Stay tuned, and if you have a story to share, contact a fellow.